It may have already ruined my 2021! We'll see!

Oh s***! I just realized this is the last Inoue script you get to experience until all the way after Den-O, too!

I am genuinely sorry for you right now.

Well, time, Kobayashi, and trying very hard to forget this episode should at least put me in a much better place to enjoy Kiva. Summer of Inoue!

Ahh yes this is what ruined 2021 not the *redacted* or the *redacted* or even the *redacted* :P

This is another of those rare Kabuto things that stuck with me since the first time I watched it, and what stuck with me is that I think it sucked too!

You already went into how heartless and unfortunate the whole sequence of events is. I remember distinctly thinking that if it just centered around like a victim-of-the-week or some character otherwise introduced really recently, it'd just be a worse (as in worse written) version of what happened to Imperer. But for this to be how Sasword's character concludes, after the show spends so much time dangling his nature as a worm over hour heads for so long, kinda stings especially bad.

I don't believe any of the writers had any long-term plan for how Tsurugi's story would conclude (which is probably why a secondary writer was allowed to be the one to write his send-off), but surely there were more interesting ways for him to go out than just 'okay hes evil now, explode him'. There were MOTW on this show that had more interesting endings, after all.

Also Misaki is just reduced to being 'person sad about Tsurugi" which is sadly expected, but she wasn't exactly the most crucial character up till now anyway, so... eh.

Inoue was the only thing I had left to believe in after 2020, and that's all gone! There is nothing left to look forward to! I gotta go get some spurs, some chains, and a leather jacket with a sleeve missing! I live in the darkness now forever! Or at least until I randomly decide not to!

What's shocking is that the same writer gave a legit monster antagonist a bittersweet and heartfelt send-off, but a series regular Rider got to be a boring asshole for an episode before dying for virtually no good reason.

She's literally the only good character in this episode, because she's the only one who looks at Tsurugi's circumstance as a highly-preventable one, instead of some grim inevitability. She slaps Kagami for keeping this all to himself for months. She tries to stop Tendou from killing Tsurugi for virtually no good reason. She even gets the Inoue classic Person Is Person line! (I mean, she does a variation on it. She says "Tsurugi was... still Tsurugi.") She's the only person in this episode who acts like both someone I've been watching on Kabuto for a while, and not a complete asshole.

No good deed or logical assertion is rewarded here, not when we have tear glands to milk...

Also about your question, I don't think there's a specific example among the shows you've watched of a character dying, but there has and will be plenty of shows where I sadly spend all my time just headcanoning the ways it could have been ideal for me personally. Kamen Rider permanently changed the way my brain works, I'm sad to say!

Man. I feel kinda bad only weighing in now when it's on something so negative, after I've had nothing else to say about the rest of the show, but...

As someone whose favourite Kabuto character is Tsurugi, this episode super super sucked for me when I watched it. And I am at least taking the silver lining here that there's no secret thing I'm missing here in my interpretation, and that people who like the show in general also think it sucks; and that the one person willing to defend this episode has his defence be that it sucks, but intentionally.

It's not an episode I actually come back to a lot, I don't have a vendetta against it or anything (though, boy, what Fish says about that industrial location sticking out in your mind is really true), but it is one that really underpinned by dislike of Kabuto at the time. Not one I liked at all.

While it doesn't fix some of the larger problems with the narrative, I would like to be very clear that this is not the plot.

Tsurugi is faking his turn from the second he comes back out of the water. His plan from the start is to round up all the Worms in one place to be destroyed by the Riders. This includes his own destruction, of course.

The thing with the press, especially, is meant to be bogus, which you can tell from Tendou's reaction to everything that goes down in that scene. He knows what's going on before he even gets there, and the whole reason he goes through with killing Tsurugi is to allow him to do exactly what he's been trying to since his debut – fulfill his wish to defeat all Worms. Or, uh, a whole bunch of 'em, at least... We'll see how that goes!

Not that any of this changes how needlessly cruel the episode is, among other things, but still!

I mean, I'm more just torn on it than anything? I massively enjoyed watching it again, even, and there's a ton I legitimately love in its execution, but it's real tough to come in here and say you should all be more appreciative of this weirdly fatalistic narrative that I seriously am convinced must've ruined Christmas for a lot of children back in '06. Like, it is very okay to hate this episode!

Ah, right, thank you for clearing that up. I think I knew that but I was choosing to sum up my thoughts real quick in a poor way!

A set-up like this, you'd think for sure the solution would be one of the heroes realising what the antagonist is doing, and thus saving them from their own attempted destruction. So I guess one can say this episode subverts expectations...